If the life sciences are to have much to say about politics, there needs to be a universal element to political orientations. In this essay, I argue that the recent prominence of nativist, law-and-order, populist politicians reveals the nature of this universal element. All social units have to address bedrock dilemmas about how to deal with norm violators and how welcoming to be to outsiders as well as to proponents of new lifestyles. Might differences on these core dilemmas be the universal element of political life? Using the followers of one of the most prominent examples of a nativist political leader—Donald Trump—as an example, I present data showing that Trump’s most earnest followers are different from others—even those who share their general ideological leanings—not on traditional economic or social issues, but rather on the group-based security issues that grow out of the bedrock dilemmas of social life.

In Canada, foreign-born older adults (FBOAs) have a higher prevalence of chronic conditions and poorer self-reported physical and mental health than their Canadian-born peers. However, very little research has explored FBOAs’ experiences of health care after immigration. This review aims to understand the patient experiences of older immigrants within the Canadian health care system. Employing Arksey and O’Malley’s framework for scoping reviews, we searched six databases and identified 12 articles that discussed the patient experience of this population. Although we sought to understand patient experience, the studies largely focused on barriers to care, including: communication difficulties, lack of cultural integration, systematic barriers in health care, financial barriers, and intersecting barriers related to culture and gender.

This review provides insight into new areas of research and advocates for strengthened policy and/or programming. Our review also highlights that there is a paucity of literature for an ever-growing segment of the Canadian population.

Due to demographic developments, the number of immigrant families with older members is growing across Western Europe. Poised between the different approaches to care in their countries of origin and destination, such families are treading new ground as they negotiate support for older family members. Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 older and younger family members from 20 Turkish immigrant families in Denmark, this article investigates the broad variation in how these families approach caring for older people. At one end of the scale, some families (re)create a traditional Turkish approach to care in which three generations live together and the daughter-in-law is the main care provider. At the other end of the scale, some families follow the Danish approach in which families rely on public care provision. In between these two poles, many families devise a variety of care solutions for their older members that often rely on considerable support by family. Utilising Cati Coe's concept of care-scription, the analysis shows how families negotiate – and sometimes struggle over – who will shoulder which tasks. In the post-migration context, daughters-in-law are often able to retreat from their traditional role of care provider, which in turn increases expectations of daughters' care provisions. In Denmark, which is a relatively gender-equal society, Turkish daughters may seek to make their brothers take on a greater role in the provision of care for their parents, and in some families, the children also turn towards public care provisions to share the burden of parental care. Resistance from older parents may, however, short-circuit this strategy. Overall, the study points both to the difficulties faced by older immigrants with limited host-country language proficiency when utilising public European care provisions and to the complex and unsettled nature of care provisions in immigrant families in Europe today.

This review article provides a critique of Marilyn Lake’s Progressive New World, a monograph that postulates that Australian/Australasian transpacific exchange shaped the development of American progressivism. The review outlines the major contours of her claim, notes her ambivalence concerning her overall position, and critiques her decision to not explain/examine differences in the political culture of the United States of America and Australia. The review seeks to overcome this problem by examining key differences in the cultural history of both societies and draws on the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy and America. The review (a) develops a model which provides a means to understand how one society can impact another; (b) contrasts the origins of progressivism in the United States of America and Australia; (c) examines the work of the Australian scholar Michael Roe, who postulated that American progressivism was the independent factor impacting Australian developments; (d) distinguishes between two types of progressivism – racist conceit, pure and simple, and broader social reforms, which may or may not entrench racist conceit; and (e) examines various dimensions of progressivism which Marilyn Lake has used in developing her claim.

Labor Secretary Frances Perkins championed liberal immigration policies between 1933 and 1940. Some efforts were successful, but most were not due to political, economic, and social constraints on immigration policy making, especially in Congress. Yet, she reorganized the enforcement functions of her department when she created the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Narratives abound about the period, though few delve into this reorganization. In this article, I share an analytical framework that I developed, “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization,” to explain how Perkins temporarily eased the debarments, as well as deportations, of newcomers by adjusting agency resources, including staffing, budget, and infrastructure. I describe how she responded to pressures from immigration restrictionists by tightening these functions. My narrative adds to the literature on immigration policy history, which has not fully appreciated the role of bureaucratic reorganization. This research bolsters the perspective in political control theory that bureaucratic structure merits as much attention as does legislation as a tool for control.

Recent research projects, publications, and above all the results of developer-funded archaeology provide materials for a re-assessment of the impact of Hadrian's Wall on the indigenous peoples whose lands it transected. Previous analysis has been concerned with the greater or lesser degree of ‘Romanisation’ of an Iron Age society perceived as little changed under Roman rule, with the Wall seen as a bureaucratic border running through an homogeneous frontier zone, as described by C.R. Whittaker. Although the local settlement pattern survived the original Flavian conquest of the region intact, it is now apparent that the building of the Wall under Hadrian had profound and far from benign consequences for local people. To the north of the barrier the traditional settlement pattern was largely abandoned and new social authorities emerged, while to the south there is evidence for new economic structures imposed from outside and the settlement of immigrants. The paper considers the extent to which these developments were the outcome of conscious policies by the Roman authorities.

Previous research has shown that the public tends to see some groups as less deserving of social rights. Our focus in this article is whether they are also seen as less entitled to engage in political claims-making. Recent theorists of inclusive nationalism argue that whether minorities are seen as having the right to codetermine the future may depend on whether the majority believes minorities are morally committed to the nation. Drawing on a unique survey experiment, we test this intuition by analyzing how majority perceptions of a minority's commitment to the larger society influence support for claims-making by immigrants and national minorities. We show that immigrants, French-speaking Quebeckers, and Indigenous peoples are judged more harshly about their right to make claims and that this is in part explained by the majority's views that these groups are not, in fact, committed members of the larger political community.

Native allies are critical to the success of immigrants’ social movements in East Asian countries because of their relatively small number. However, it remains unclear whether advocacy messages from natives or from immigrants are more effective in changing natives’ attitudes toward supporting immigrant-oriented policies. We hypothesize, from the perspective of social identity theory, that the persuasiveness of a message varies, depending on the identity of the group sending the message—that is, whether it is an in-group or an out-group. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a survey experiment using the case of granting local voting rights to immigrants in Japan. We found that support for granting local voting rights to immigrants does not decrease when the Japanese hear advocacy messages from the Japanese, however, it does decrease when they hear messages from Korean immigrants who stand to benefit from the granting of local suffrage. These results suggest that natives’ advocacy messages may increase support for immigrants.